Bicyclists, Jews, and Cartoonists

In her famous essay on antisemitism published in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tells this sinister joke: “An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.” In January 2015, that sinister joke was uncannily revived. Islamist terrorists killed Jews and cartoonists. And France and the Western world, in shock, asked: Why the cartoonists? The great march of January 11 was mobilized in support of the victims and survivors of Charlie Hebdo. Indeed, after Mohammed Merah's 2012 Toulouse rampage, wherein those murdered included a rabbi and three Jewish children targeted as such, there was no national march, no international mobilization. Killing Jews, although it would be disingenuous to claim that it leaves people indifferent—it does not—nonetheless does not provoke the same surprise as killing cartoonists in the heart of Paris. It does not generate a national and international outcry and official mourning. Killing Jews, even today, in Paris, is “understandable,” or at least expected. It is far from routine, far from normal, and I am not in the least suggesting that people are jaded or numbed. They are not. But harassing and killing Jews is part of a historical pattern—pogroms and murderous and genocidal antisemitism. French Jews have not forgotten former Prime Minister Raymond Barre's antisemitic blunder, in the aftermath of the bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue in 1980, an attack that killed Jews and passers-by. Barre expressed outrage that the terrorists had killed Jews AND “innocent victims.” Why the non-Jewish passersby? And then again: Why the cartoonists?

I do not claim to have an answer to that troubling question, but I can offer a surmise. I would argue that there is more correlation between Jews and cartoonists than between Jews and, say, bicyclists. This is not because humor and satire would be inherently Jewish (there are some very serious and gloomy Jews out there); this is not because every satirist, in the mind of antisemitic and humorless Islamists, is an honorary Jew. Why cartoonists, then? Perhaps because political cartoons, and especially those in Charlie Hebdo, embody a French anticlericalism and secularism rooted in a ruthless critique of institutionalized religion that started with the Enlightenment and the Libertines.